The Training Wheels for God

Now that you're through laughing at me for suggesting I could narrate audio books because of my high school flirtation with Thespianism (I wasn't invited to flirt with lesbianism, even telling chicks I was a woman trapped in a man's body didn't get me anywhere with that crowd).

Yeah, it was a crowd at my high school. It was so un-bold to come out of the closet, I told people I was bisexual for a while because chicks liked it. Well, some chicks liked it, others assumed it meant I had HIV. And I couldn't bring myself to actually kiss a guy, even if it might get me somewhere with a girl, so I dropped it.

So anyway, I've been reading 'Grendel' by John Gardner. He posits a lot of the existential arguments that Anne Rice does in 'Interview with A Vampire,' except he does it without being pedantic and in 10% of the space. And I got to thinking about debates I've had with people over 'faith,' and so on.

I know a guy who's trying to 'build a mystery' as I think Sarah McLachlan would put it, reading Jung and Crowley and trying to cobble together his own personal god. Or demigod, he seems a little hazy on that point.

Which is almost as goofy as a teenage boy pretending to homosexual impulses to get girls.

Prior to reading 'Darwin's Black Box' by Micahel Behe, I was a lifelong atheiest. And I mean atheist: the faith that there is no God. Not agnostic, unsure, but absolutely convicted on the point that there is no supernatural, nothing beyond life in the organic sense, which is something that 'just happened.'

The Intelligent Design argument has turned out to have enough throw weight that I've had a crisis of faith in my atheism, and so am probably now more in that agnostic column. But anyway...

When I say lifelong, I mean when I was four or five, I can recall my Dad telling me about how God created the universe, the world, etc., and life, from clouds of gasses and so on. I believed the Santa Claus bit, the Easter Bunny, etc. But this God thing, I thought, How gullible does he think I am?

So it seemed like this total outright whopper. As I grew older, found out the ugly truth about Santa and the Tooth Fairy and so on, that somehow reinforced the God as fiction instinct I'd had. I was made to go to church well into my teens, and even went through the motions of confirmation class and baptism. I remember thinking, if there is a God, and he is omnipotent, he could surely tell that I didn't believe what I was doing was legit.

I had this horrible idea that I was doing this partly to please my parents, and partly out of this dreadful prospect that there was a God, and that hopefully even though I didn't mean it when I got dipped, maybe I'd escape Hell on some sort of afterlife equivalent of a legal technicality.

Then I went to Russian Orthodox church because a friend at school had a Mom who didn't believe in cleaning house, thought Playboy in the bathroom magazine rack was di rigeur, and that 17 year old boys should be able to have a drink of whiskey here and there. She also went to a Russian Orthodox church, and the music was better than the protestant church (though by then my protestations of atheism had gotten me a pass from mandatory attendance). I even sang in the choir, not to please anyone, or to try and trick God or anything like that. They needed basses, and I liked the music. Plus, if you're going to stand through a two hour service, standing with the choir seemed more logical than standing in front of a chair you wouldn't be using.

I liked the ritual of Russian Orthodox Church. The incense, the costumes, the iconography. The unyielding tradition of using a liturgy that's always been done in the vernacular, but that had only had two or three line edits in seventeen centuries.

But I got bored with that and, worried that Reagan was going to draft me for a war that wasn't happening, I switched to a Friends Meeting, where they don't have any music. Quakers are pretty much the best opposite you could come up with for the Russian Orthodox. Where the latter still not only won't ordain women priests, but won't let women behind the alter screen, the Friends Meeting was celebrating lesbian 'marriage' in 1987. That wedding broke my heart too, because I'd had my eye on one of the pair, and was too dense to realize they were a couple to begin with.

The other thing about the Quakers, no sermon. No minister to give one. Everyone sits there, the pews weren't even all facing the same way, and there was a huge poster on the wall that declared 'Nicaragua is Not Our Enemy' for when I got bored with checking out the hot lesbian M.D. who was way too old for me and out of my league if she'd been straight and single. I was there to establish a grounds for Conscientious Objector status.

There was a dude at that Friends Meeting house who went to jail instead of war during World War II. That's guts, man. And faith. You don't take that kind of weight for principles if you don't have some hard-core faith.

But when I jumped out of an airplane ten years ago (okay, I hung onto the strut until I was told to 'look up' and let go, but it's still called a jump), that took buckets of faith. The instructors had taught us for eight hours how to increase our chances of surviving, and I took what they told me on faith. Really, I'd never met these guys, so I probably wouldn't have picked them up hitch-hiking, but I trusted their instruction. I trusted them to pack my parachute, set the auto release for the secondary that would blow if I didn't have a canopy over me when I fell to 1000 feet (in case the static line failed and I was passed out or something). I trusted the static line to pull my primary. The pilot to fly the plane, all this faith. It's not like going to jail for two years when it would have been 1000 times easier to enlist and seek a non-combatant job or something. But still, dangling your feet in the air 3500 feet off the ground with the intention to let go when told to...

That's just one example. To an extent, starting in on 'Grendel' was an excercise in faith that Jay and others who've recommended John Gardner to me were making a sound recommendation.

So if Santa Claus and so on is the training wheels for God, I still haven't learned to ride the damned bike. But to follow that metaphor, I can apparently ride a unicycle when it comes to skydiving.